the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you all about our upcoming awful weather, and post some nice pictures, too. You may remember me from such posts as “Not Spring” among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. A bit slanted, like last time. The guy I live with just snapped my picture with his phone. Sometimes the phone takes good pictures, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s true of the other cameras here, too.
Like for instance, these pictures of hens-and-chicks: Those were taken with a 90mm macro lens, which cost more than the point-and-shoot camera that took these pictures: There’s probably a moral there somewhere. Maybe not. He likes taking pictures of hens and chicks. There are a lot of them here.

Well anyway, here’s the scoop on the weather.
Today, right now at almost 7 p.m., it’s 64 degrees Fahrenheit (18C) with eleven percent humidity. Sunny and dry.
By tonight it will be snowing, with a low tomorrow night of 16 degrees Fahrenheit (-8.8C), with about ten inches of snow predicted, and then snow all week long.
You can possibly imagine what the guy I live with thinks about all of this.

But whatever. This has been a pretty stressful week here, as it no doubt has for a lot of people. It was pretty unsettling not to have a car in the garage, which the guy I live with admitted was a first-world problem, but he was so used to having the car (which he bought for his wife) sitting in the garage, ready to take us wherever we needed to go, if we needed to go somewhere. It wasn’t so much not being able to go anywhere, though that was something, but the missing car was like a gap in the continuity which is so important here.

The guy I live with has been having food delivered, but just this evening he discovered he could have food delivered from the Indian restaurant he and his wife went to all the time. He was so happy he cried a little.

The guy I live with also cut his own hair. It looks pretty good, actually

Now I have some more pictures.

Muscari leucostomum.

This is a named form of Iris bucharica, but the label has been lost. Probably broken by hail.

A pulsatilla, with Scilla melaina (possibly) in front of it. 

The native bluebell, Mertensia lanceolata, which is common along the foothills here.
An achillea, maybe Achillea umbellata.Here are some forms of Corydalis solida. The guy I live with really struggled to get decent pictures of these. I’m not sure why he had that problem. 

Last year there was this red corydalis seedling way out past where all the other corydalis are, which was kind of interesting, so today the guy I live with took a picture of it, and it wasn’t until the picture got posted here that he noticed the purple one next to it.
Pretty cool, huh?Well, that’s all. I guess we’ll be buried in snow for the next week.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me looking at a cat in a neighbor’s yard. That was pretty exciting.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today because, well, because. You may remember me from such posts as “Not Quite Like Me”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose. It was the camera that was slanted, not me. Well, the guy I live with felt kind of odd about showing a bunch of pictures with snow in them in the last post, and so here’s a post with no snow at all.

And also, this is like super-weird, the Outlook program that we use for email was getting a lot of spam, so the guy I live with created some rules, as they say, and so all the spam went into the trash, but now, all the comments from WordPress are going into the trash too, so he has to look for them, instead of them just being there, if you know what I mean.

Not much happened today.  The garden isn’t very green, but it never really is ultra-green by anyone else’s standards.The one thing that is happening, though, and it’s pretty noticeable, is what I might call an invasion of bees. Honeybees. The back yard is alive with them; you can hear them buzzing when you walk around. There are hundreds of bees. I sometimes like to snack on them but there are so many.
They’re mostly interested in the puschkinias. There are a lot of puschkinias.
And on the tulips, too. There are lots of corydalises in flower too. The guy I live with says it’s corydalis. (Really “corydales”. Nobody says that.)
Corydalis angustifolia has seeded all over the garden. It smells like vanilla cake. I’ve never had vanilla cake but the guy I live with says that’s a good way to describe it. Then there’s Corydalis ruksansii. This picture isn’t in focus, but the guy I live with couldn’t bend down to take the picture.One of many different forms of Corydalis glaucescens. It’s pinker than the picture shows, but really is growing at a slant like that. It’s on a slope. Well, maybe sort of. The guy I live with has been trying to get pictures of these and none have turned out.  Some of the forms are already done flowering. Corydalis schanginii subsp. schanginii has just started.Some other pictures. This is Colchicum hungaricum ‘Valentine’, flowering in one of the frames. The flowers are pinker than they look. I’m not sure what the issue with pink is.  This could really be more in focus but the guy I live with hasn’t mastered focusing with the phone. Sometimes he thinks everything is absolutely focused and then he finds out it isn’t. That’s another one of those metaphors we could do without.
The white form of Crocus tommasinianus in one of the shadiest spots in the yard.Fuzzy pulsatillas. There used to be a lot more pulsatillas in the garden than there are now. After the guy I live with’s wife died, a lot of plants weren’t taken care of like they should have been. It does make him sad to think of all the plants that used to be here; gentians, androsaces, pulsatillas, and so on. Thinking about the way things were. But we both still like the garden.Fritillaria pallidiflora coming up through leaves of Cyclamen cilicium. Oh. I was about to let you go, but then I realized that I hadn’t even talked about one of the most important things here. Pretty major, really.
You may recall a post I made just last October called “A Discovery”, well, you might like to know that we have a pretty good supply of microwave popcorn now. Both Newman’s Own and Orville Redenbacher’s. (There’s even more in a box downstairs.)
Flowers are okay and stuff, but there’s no comparison to having a plentiful supply of popcorn. I don’t think I get my fair share, but the guy I live with says that I do.
I guess you can tell that things are not totally terrible here.

The guy I live with has been watching The Simpsons, starting at the third season, and it hasn’t been all that easy for him, but he’s also been enjoying the episodes. He said he remembered when he and Cindy first saw each episode and that’s been bittersweet. He went downstairs to the studio to get the DVDs of the seventh season, which had been sitting there since she died. That was a bit of a peculiar feeling.
And he also realized that Troy McClure said “You might remember me” and wondered how he could have gotten that wrong, but it’s too late to go back and change every single post. Or even this one. Maybe you didn’t realize that that was an homage to The Simpsons, and to his wife who loved the show so much.

So whatever. That’s our motto. We have popcorn. And things are weird. 

Until next time, then.